1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and a method of detecting the operating time of a bender, and more specifically to an apparatus and a method of detecting the operating time of a bender by separating the trial bendings from the actual bendings or vice versa.
2. Description of the Prior Art
A bender can bend work (i.e., a plate material) with the use a tool composed of a pair of punch and die brought into contact with and separated from each other. In the conventional bender, when a ram to which the die is mounted reaches an upper limit point, for instance, an upper limit point signal is generated, and the generated upper limit point signals are counted and recorded to count and record the upper limit point signals to detect the operating time of the bender.
In the conventional apparatus or method, however, since the number of times that the ram reaches the upper limit point is simply counted, there exists a problem in that it has been impossible to discriminate between the trial bendings and the actual bendings (products are bent actually) with respect to the number of bending times or the bending time period spent in the bendings.
This is because, originally, the trial bending time must be considered as the man-hour (workload of a standard worker for one hour) for setup, and the actual bending time must be considered as the man-hour for real operating. Therefore, when the trial and actual bending times cannot be discriminated, an accurate standard man-hour cannot be obtained, so that it is impossible to obtain a rational product plane and a reliable cost calculation or management.